Taking Leave Of Darwin A Longtime Agnostic Discovers The Case For Design

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University professor Neil Thomas was a committed Darwinist and agnostic—until an investigation of evolutionary theory led him to a startling conclusion: “I had been conned!” As he studied the work of Darwin’s defenders, he found himself encountering tactics eerily similar to the methods of political brainwashing he had studied as a scholar. Thomas felt impelled to write a book as a sort of warning call to humanity: “Beware! You have been fooled!” The result is Taking Leave of Darwin, a wide-ranging history of the evolution debate. Thomas uncovers many formidable Darwin opponents that most people know nothing about, ably distills crucial objections raised early and late against Darwinism, and shows that those objections have been explained away but never effectively answered. Thomas’s deeply personal conclusion? Intelligent design is not only possible but, indeed, is presently the most reasonable explanation for the origin of life’s great diversity of forms.

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PROLOGUE

WHAT IF CHARLES DARWIN GOT IT WRONG? WHAT IF ALL THE crises, alienations, and losses of faith we associate with the aftermath of the publication of The  Origin of Species1 had been triggered by a false prospectus? What if the latent but ever-present hostilities between science and religion of the last 160 years had been fomented by the equivalent of a “dodgy dossier”?

Like many others who “learned about” Darwin in school, I internalized his ascent-of-man narrative without demur, through what in retrospect seems like little more than a passive process of osmosis. By the second half of the twentieth century, Darwinism had become accepted as part and parcel of the mental furniture and indeed the fashionable thinking of the day, such that it would have seemed politically incorrect (and worse, un-hip) to challenge the truth-status of The Origin of Species. I must certainly have thought so since I recollect showing off my (superficial) knowledge of Darwinism to my first girlfriend, and doing so absolutely convinced that what I was saying was uncontestable.

To be sure, it had sometimes struck me that The Origin of Species contained some strange and counter-intuitive ideas, but I told myself that modern science is often counter-intuitive2 (remembering the vast indeterminacies thrown up by recent advances in quantum theory), and I gave the matter little further thought.  Since Darwin had been fêted by the scientific community for more than a century and a half, I deferred to what I imagined must be the properly peer-reviewed orthodoxy. Surely, I reasoned, any opposition to Darwin must be confined to the peripheral ranks of Biblical fundamentalists and young-earth creationists.

This complaisant (and complacent) stance was rather shaken when more recently I encountered some less easily disregarded opposition emerging from some of Darwin’s latter-day peers in the ranks of scientific academe. Collectively, these publications made me alive to the possibility that the grand story of evolution by natural selection was little more than a creation myth to satisfy the modern age; and I found it impossible to ignore the dispute as being a “merely academic” issue, for if there is one subject which has had huge, often convulsive implications for the generality of humankind, it is Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Any dispute concerning Darwin must necessarily have far-reaching implications beyond the guild of the biological sciences. It is not given to many to be able to muster the kind of equanimity shown by Charles  James Fox Bunbury (brother-in-law to nineteenth-century geologist Sir  Charles Lyell), who opined that, mortifying as the notion of human descent from jellyfish might be, “it will not make much difference practically”3; or to equal Dr.  Johnson’s priceless reaction to the notion held by an eccentric nobleman (Lord Monboddo) that man could be descended from apes: “Conjecture as to things useful, is good, but conjecture as to what would be useless to know, such as whether men went on all fours, is very idle.”4T he majority of our Victorian forbears certainly could not find it within themselves to be so philosophical about a theory of human evolution that projected them into “a suddenly mechanistic world without a mechanic,” to borrow a phrase used by  Noel Annan in his biography of Sir  Leslie Stephen (said to have lost his faith after reading Darwin).5 This sense of being cast adrift from the erstwhile reassurances of the Christian faith was at painful variance with the paradigm of a providentially directed cosmos which had prevailed throughout the Christian centuries up to 1859.

In addition, when Darwin discharged his famous Parthian shot twelve years after publication of The Origin of Species in the  Descent of Man (1871),6 with its notorious claim of humankind’s consanguinity with simian forbears, this amounted to a rather unambiguous demotion of humankind to a considerably lesser place in the scheme of things than its wonted pedestal just “a little lower than the angels,”7 a demotion later exacerbated by  Sigmund Freud’s conclusions about the “hominid” nature of our subconscious minds.

It struck me that if a group of tenured academics and other responsible scientists could no longer support the claims on which these devastating inferences depended, and on which the worldview of much of the West presently rests, then this was surely a matter of some existential moment. Such disquieting possibilities drove me to investigate for myself the dispute between pro- and contra-Darwin factions. I make no apology for having made the attempt to read my way into a subject for which I have no formal qualifications, since my researches have led me to the conviction that the subject is of too universal an import to be left entirely in the hands of subject specialists, some of whom exhibit an alarming degree of bias and intransigent parti pris unconducive to the dispassionate sifting of scientific evidence.

Few coming to this subject can of course claim to occupy that fabled Archimedean vantage point of “seeing things clearly, and seeing them whole,” and I make no such hyperbolic claim for myself. However, given the dismayingly sectarian nature of many evolution debates, it is a tedious but unavoidable necessity that I should add here at the outset that I have long been a non-theist and can at least give the assurance that the critique which follows will be based solely on rational criteria and principles.

The book is structured as follows. In the first chapter, I introduce the broad subject of how Charles Darwin and  Alfred Russel Wallace came to formulate their theory of evolution by natural selection.

The second chapter looks at Darwin’s intellectual formation from boyhood to maturity and the immediate reception of his Origin of Species with non-specialist British readers.

Chapter 3 turns to the mostly critical nineteenth-century reviews and receptions of The Origin of Species in the years and decades just after its publication, before Darwin had become the respected sage of his later years. The refreshing honesty of the early responses gives added clarity to the voices of dissent from Darwinism that were always present but which have become more insistent in recent decades. Those more recent responses are also covered in this chapter, together with the fraught issue of the fossil evidence marshalled to support Darwin’s claims (which is exiguous and has occasionally even been proven fraudulent). We then look at what is in effect Darwin’s companion volume to the Origin, namely The Descent of Man.

The fourth chapter considers those cosmological discoveries in the last half century with a bearing on the question of how the earth gained the unique supportive biosphere which enabled the evolution of plants, animals, and humans. Thereafter I unpack, and in some cases unmask, the frequently unacknowledged religious or anti-religious attitudes which have scarred the search for solidly based empirical findings for more than a century and a half.

In Chapter 5 I turn to the subject of what we can reasonably expect of the scientific method and what not to expect in the perennial quest to reveal the mysteries of life. In particular I question whether unrealistic expectations have led to questionable conclusions and issue an open invitation to subject specialists to reappraise the whole subject of natural selection as an evolutionary pathway.

In the final chapter I draw together threads from previous chapters to form a concluding synthesis. I round off the volume with some reflections on how researching and writing about this subject has brought me to a place I would have found surprising before I embarked on the project, especially regarding the intersection of science and religion. A short epilogue is also appended.

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EPILOGUE 

WHEN MY WIFE AND I VISIT RURAL BRITTANY, ONE OF OUR FAVORITE ports of call is a lovely coastal church called St. Jean du Doigt (Saint John of the Finger), where the eponymous digit of the apostle is popularly supposed to be stored. For us this quaint belief adds to the unspoiled charm of the Breton countryside. Historically the medieval practice of collecting saints’ relics is now of course commonly regarded as a form of “pious fraud,” a means of buttressing the power and influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. What struck me recently is that the instrumentalization of an unverifiable, non-evidence-based hypothesis to prop up today’s secular ideology presents a telling mirror image of the medieval practice. Given the secularizing volte-face experienced in post-Christian Europe, an important motive for giving such an easy pass to the quasi-magical notion of natural selection seems to be the desire to deter people from entertaining any notion of divine creation.

If anything, this modern form of hoodwinking seems less forgivable than its medieval variant, since it is so out of line with the values of our “age of the masses” (to borrow the title of Michael Biddiss’s classic), an age of universal suffrage and democracy where each individual has the right to make up his or her mind. To allow and abet a deception to be practiced upon people in the attempt to prevent them making up their own minds about something as fundamental as their preferred existential position in life is to my mind as misguided and paternalistic a practice as any perpetrated by the medieval Church.

It is now half a human lifetime since Michael Denton issued his decisive critique of modern evolutionary theory, and yet many biologists continue on, business as usual. School textbooks still purvey the same broadly Darwinian interpretation of life, including the presentation of “evidences” for evolution that have long since been discredited.1 Richard Dawkins was recently given a very easy ride by Mark Urban on BBC’s Newsnight program.2 And in the teeth of all empirical evidence to the contrary, contemporary Darwinism has become accepted as the most grown-up form of understanding of humankind’s existential status by the many who, I suspect, have had little time or opportunity to “fact check” the propositions they are buying into. For more and more people, this acceptance seems to be a wholly unexamined assumption.

However, not all have been so unenquiring or supine, and Richard Dawkins has even been stung to lament the fact that outsiders have presumed to question the assumptions of biology specialists whereas they disregard what goes on in other branches of science such as, say, quantum theory. The reason for this is of course (as he must surely know) that his particular discipline holds such vast implications for the existential situation of all men and women, for the very “ground of their being,” such that many quite rightly find it impossible to ignore. If nothing else has been achieved in this short volume, I hope, by presenting views which differ from current orthodoxy, to have given readers the chance to reflect with me on the many problematical facets of modern evolutionary theory, and to grapple with the possible implications of evidence that does not easily accord with materialism.

My own position, as a long-standing humanist with no allegiance to any revealed faith, remains that we each have to come to terms with an inscrutable universe in the best, and most morally accountable, way we can. Others should be free to come to their own conclusions on an issue in which there may be no unalloyed truth-bearers, only truth-seekers, in whose number I very much still count myself.

Taking Leave Of Darwin

A Longtime Agnostic Discovers The Case For Design

Neil Thomas